34 



THE COCO-NUT 



CHAP. 



It is worth while to remember, moreover, that the 

 coco-nut is a perennial, and that it and its diseases find 

 conditions in general constant throughout the year. 

 Nature places no bar of winter to the spread of its pests. 

 The field crops of the farmer in the temperate zones can 

 at least easily be made to begin each season free of 

 disease. No pest of temperate lands has ever wiped 

 out a great industry, as the coffee rust did the coffee 

 business of Ceylon. In the forests of temperate countries 

 the great bulk of the vegetation over extensive areas is 

 made up of at most a very few species, often of a single 

 one. In the tropics the climatic opportunities for 

 epidemics are so much greater that a characteristically 

 different type of forest has been evolved, in which a 

 great number of kinds of trees are present, and each is 

 comparatively widely and sparsely scattered. Such a 

 formation as a pine forest, or oak forest, or coco-nut 

 forest cannot exist in nature in the tropics ; and if men 

 will plant and maintain forests of coco-nut, or any other 

 single tree, in the tropics, it will prove to be possible, 

 in the long run, only by greater care in guarding against 

 disease than any crop of temperate lands requires. 



The preceding discussion was written in 1909 as an 

 introduction to a series of lectures on coco-nut pests. 

 During the intervening four years about as many new 

 pests have been described as all that were previously 

 known, and more has been written on the subject than 

 in all previous time. The end is of course not yet. In 

 the study of coco-nut diseases the last eight years show 

 an excellent record. The immediate future should show 

 much greater devotion to practical interference with 

 pests. Knowledge of the nature of pests and of the 

 mischief they do, or even of methods of combating 

 them, is not of great value unless it is applied. 



FUNGI 



A considerable number of fungi are known to live 

 upon the coco-nut. Among these are two of the woody 



